Over the past month the west had its “horsemeat” scare, where horse DNA traces have been found in pretty much everything. It is now China’s turn to reciprocate, with 1,200 pigs found in Shanghai’s Huangpu River. Why someone would dump thousands of dead pigs in the river? Who knows – we are confident that it is bullish, however, and it is time fro GETCO or K-Hen to do something about this strange reddish color in the futures. It is not helping with confidence in central planning…

The municipal authorities said the retrieved pigs would be collected and handled in a harmless way.

According to the labels pinned in the ears of the pigs which are used to trace their information, the dead pigs are found to come from the upstream waters of the Huangpu River.

The local authorities are conducting coordinated efforts to stop the dumping of dead pigs from the source.

Local media reports said the pigs mainly came from Shanghai’s neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.

The water quality of Shanghai has not been affected by the floating dead pigs, according to the city’s water supply bureau.

But fear not: just like Fukushima (which has its 2 year anniversary today) was reported by the government for days and days to be just a minor blip and only conspiracy theorists were allowed to associate dangerous radioactivity with a nuclear power plant explosion, so pigs in a river are, according to China, perfectly normal:

“The data of water quality are all within the normal range,” said the bureau.

One wonders how many pigs in the river would shift the water quality to “abnormal”…